NASA will on 4 February beam Beatles' ditty Across the Universe into deep space to mark the 40th anniversary of the day the Fab Four recorded the song, as well as the launch 50 years ago this week of Explorer 1 and the 45th birthday of its Deep Space Network (DSN).
According to the press release, the transmission is being …

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bit overly optimistic

Yoko Ono, chipped in with: "I see that this is the beginning of the new age in which we will communicate with billions of planets across the universe."

did anyone tell her that this isn't the first radio wave to be beamed out to space, and that after a long time of radio waves beaming out of earth we've only picked up one or two interesting signals back...

I'm not saying there aren't any aliens out there, just they probably don't use radio communication and have long since stopped using the most basic of electronic radio detection kit. We are after all a rather young planet comparatively speaking.

hahaha @ all posters

@Karl Lattimer

Agree with your comment re: Yoko Ono. What makes it worse is her total lack of understanding re basic physics. eg/ takes a VEEEERRRRRY long time to have a conversation with some one 431 light years away!!!!

RIAA poised to sue every alien

for not paying royalties for hearing it. With the SCUM-IAA around aliens won't bother responding, they'll stick two fingers up, shove the track on their ipods and carry on their daily bus royalty free...

You bloody philestines!

DRM

All well and good but in this crappy world of DRM encoded music and payperdownload files, how are these "aliens" supposed to play it back? I can see it now, freakish alien sitting in front of it's crApple MAC with it's iFarce and a glaring error message telling it the file wasn't downloaded on that machine so there's no way on this planet it'll play.

I want to know

Aliens-- Watch your backs!!

Hey there! My little green friends. Now you've gotten the Beatles stand back for a delivery of something called Big Macs and Coke! These will be followed very shortly by something called Americans! Beware! Your very existence is in danger. Americans moslty believe in creationism and so your very existence will give them good reason to nuke you! Americans are usually oversized, and wear sunglasses. They shout a lot, as most are plainly deaf, and they bomb and kill when in other folks territory, and then have men in suits to lie about things!

Get shot of the Big Macs and Cokes now before they take root...You have been warned!

Err

MPAA / RIAA to Sue Universe

I see it all now. We beam copyrighted music into the universe, then when our alien visitors arrive with it stored on alien aPod things, and tell us that there are millions of copies in alien schools and libraies and universities, the RIAA slap a wodging great lawsuit on them.

mondegreening

Well, just hope the aliens who get the signal have indeed mastered the technology of universal real-time language translation when they receive the transmission. God knows what the song might sound to mean in their native language. The great Douglas Adams even has an example of that happening in one of his later works.

Such funny already happen among speakers of Earth's many language. i.e. The infamous "Give me my sweater back or I'll play guitar" when a particular ending theme song of a particular anime featuring a particular annoying electric mouse is heard in English, and the infamous "French Erotic Film" song when heard by English speakers who're not aware of the song's Dutch origins.

If the song coincidently ends up sounding like "your mom" insults to them, then I for one will be ready to welcome our pint-sized warmongering overlords, assuming a dog didn't eat them as soon as and when they arrive.

Alien RIAA

Of course in an infinite universe, chances are there is another planet out there who also spawned the Beatles. When they hear us apparently bit torrenting their music (on a galaxy wide basis none the less!) they're going to come after us and come after us hard.

If they're anything like the version we have, all our computers will belong.. and shall be seized forthwith. Expect them to insist other planets have to install filters so that ours doesn't show up on the wider web.

RE: Distance.

We don't know the closest star with INTELLIGENT life in it's planetary system, but it sure isn't Sol.

Seriously though, I notice any time they send out one of these deliberate signals, they send it towards a target so far away that the people who sent it won't be around when any possible reply comes. Unless they think they can live for 800 (400 if the aliens have some kind of instant interstellar transport) years.

Which Version?

@mondegreening

The two opposing leaders, resplendent in their black jewelled battle shorts, were meeting for the last time, when, a dreadful silence fell, and, at that very moment, the words, "chai guru deva, omm" drifted across the conference table. Unfortunately, in their native tongue, this was the most appalling insult imaginable, so the two opposing battle fleets decided to settle their few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our galaxy, now positively identified as the source of the offending remark. For thousands of years the mighty starships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the planet Earth - where, due to a terrible miscalculation of scale, the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.

It's too late!

By now the aliens have received our 1970s broadcasts of crappy/weepy classics such as "Feelings", "Shannon", "Disco Duck" and "Boogie Oogie Oogie" and have decided that there is no life on this planet worth contacting.

Does anyone ever wonder...

MP3 format

It'll be sent in mp3 format... a complex digital format of codecs & compression that would be impossible for any alien race to decode, without full knowledge of the specific MP3 format... so basically it would be just noise to an alien race. To broadcast to alien races that know nothing of us or our specific digital schemes, one must transmit in analog, if they were to have any hope of hearing the transmission as it was intended, & possibly try to interpret it.

MP3 format will be just noise

It'll be sent in mp3 format... a complex digital format of codecs & compression that would be impossible for any alien race to decode, without full knowledge of the specific MP3 format... so basically it would be just noise to an alien race. To broadcast to alien races that know nothing of us or our specific codecs, one must transmit in analog, if they were to have any hope of hearing the transmission as it was intended, & possibly try to interpret it.

Don't worry - it's not for entertainment

Distortion

400 years travelling through an expanding spacetime metric would cause some serious distortion to the signal. The Aliens would have to jump in their ship and fly towards the signal to hear it as we do...assuming they have ears.

Vikings

I would recommend Carl Sagan’s book “Murmurs of Earth” where he talks about the golden records put on the two Viking probes.

One bit says

"We wanted to send “Here Comes The Sun” by the Beatles, and all four Beatles gave their approval. But the Beatles did not own the copyright, and the legal status of the piece seemed too murky to risk."

What's also odd is the copyright starts to run out in 2013 on the first songs, aliens close to us could have enjoyed it legally anyway. Also a much better choice than "Across the Universe" IMHO.